Archive for September 14th, 2010

Chick Flick Tuesday highlights the best chick flicks in the movie world as well as bringing you news on upcoming chick flick releases as well as letting you all know about which chick lit books are being made into chick flick movies!

Sometimes my DVD rental service sends me things which aren’t on my list which can be a pain if they send me something off the wall but I was actually pretty pleased when I received Valentine’s Day from them. I’m not usually too keen on huge cast movies because there usually seems to be too much going on, but when I put it on, I found myself really enjoying it and loving the huge names within the film as well. Expect to see Ashton Kutcher, Jennifer Garner, Taylor Lautner (for all you Team Jacob fans!), Patrick Dempsey and more, so it really is a bit of a Hollywood ‘who’s who’ at the moment. The film follows one Valentine’s Day for all the characters of the movie, shows how their lives all intertwine without knowing it, and the ups and downs of love for them all. It’s a very sweet movie, and a great one to watch with the one you love or your best friends. It’s been slated a lot by critics, but if you can just sit and enjoy it for what it is; a sweet, romantic and funny movie, then you should enjoy it too!

“More than a dozen Angelenos navigate Valentine’s Day from early morning until midnight. Three couples awake together, but each relationship will sputter; are any worth saving? A grade-school boy wants flowers for his first true love; two high school seniors plan first-time sex at noon; a TV sports reporter gets the assignment to find romance in LA; a star quarterback contemplates his future; two strangers meet on a plane; grandparents, together for years, face a crisis; and, an “I Hate Valentine’s Day” dinner beckons the lonely and the lied to. Can Cupid finish his work by midnight?”

Back in July I got the chance to read Moonlight In Odessa by Janet Skeslien Charles, the novel that won the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance this year, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We also got to interview Janet, about the book, about Odessa and about winning such a prestigious Chick Lit award! Enjoy the interview, and do enter our giveaway to win a copy of Moonlight In Odessa!

1. Tell us about your debut novel ‘Moonlight In Odessa’ in your own words.

Moonlight in Odessa is the story of Daria, a woman who wants more. She wants a great husband, an interesting job, good friends, and a family some day. A whip-smart engineer, Daria spends her days under-employed as a secretary (a job she was lucky to get in a tough economy), she spends her evenings interpreting at a matchmaking agency that pairs lonely American men and desperate Ukrainian women. She spends her nights wondering if there is something better out there. When an American client offers her a one-way ticket out of poverty, Daria jumps at the chance to leave. But is the grass always greener on the other side of the world?

2. Are you working on a second book at all, can you tell us anything about it if so?

I’m working on another novel set in Odessa. We’ll definitely see Daria and Boba again.

(more…)

Thanks to the lovely Janet Skeslien Charles, we have a copy of her debut novel Moonlight In Odessa to giveaway to one lucky reader. All you need to do to enter is to fill in the Google form below! The giveaway is open Worldwide and will close on 19th September. Only one entry per household (full Terms & Conditions here.) Good luck!

A tragic-comic look at the flourishing market for e-mail order brides, Monlight in Odessa is a novel about the choices and sacrifices that people make in pursuit of love and stability, and the lengths that we will go to to help - and hinder - each other in search of a happy ending. Odessa , Ukraine is the humour capital of the former Soviet Union, but with prices rising and employment prospects falling, there is little for Odessans to laugh about. After months of searching, Daria, twenty-five and armed with an engineering degree and perfect English, is offered a plum job as a secretary at a foreign company. But there’s a stone in every plum, and in this case, it’s her new boss Mr. Harmon, who makes it clear that sleeping with him should be the first item on her to-do list. Loath to give up her newfound perks (the taste of real coffee, a new apartment and a salary she and her grandmother can actually live on), Daria manages to evade Harmon’s advances by recruiting her neighbour, the slippery Olga, to be his mistress - a plan that ends up working only too well…And so Daria finds herself moonlighting as an interpreter at Soviet Unions , a dating agency specializing in finding gorgeous Odessan brides for lonely Americans. Daria - so adept at spotting the cracks in the relationships she facilitates - soon discovers that she is not immune to the temptations of the American dream herself. An email correspondence with an apparently shy and sensitive American teacher who offers her a new life in San Francisco, leaves her facing a choice between her beloved city - not to mention the attentions of Vlad, a worryingly attractive mafia gangster - and her long-dreamt-of escape to the land of the free.

This giveaway is now closed.